If you haven’t seen this Barbara Walters interview of Donald Trump form 1990, take the time to watch it. Walters was known in this period for her interviews of powerful people and boy did she have Trump’s number.
Imagine what that Orange Liberace wannabe would do if someone interviewed him like that today? Imagine any reporter throwing all that at him today?
Ever since the 2004 election one of the Republican Party’s favorite tactics against Democratic opponents is the swift boat attack. You’ll recall that Sen. John Kerry was the Democratic presidential nominee and since the country was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan the campaign was emphasizing his heroic Vietnam war record. Some veterans, angry at Kerry’s later anti-war activities, contended that Kerry, a swift boat officer, was lying about his wartime actions and the GOP coordinated a full-fledged smear campaign which has become known as swift boating.
The operation was run by none other than Chris LaCivita, Donald Trump’s 2024 co-campaign manager so I suppose it’s not too surprising that the campaign believes it’s found a way to swift boat Kamala Harris. Since that inane accusation that she was lying bout being Black didn’t really work out, they seem to think that calling into question the veracity of Harris’s claim to have worked at McDonald’s when she was a teenager is some kind of stolen valor. (As the Daily Show quipped, “How dare she disrespect our men and women in uniform like that!)
Trump has been pounding this theme for the last couple of weeks at every event, screaming that she is a liar, as if lying about working at a burger joint 41 years ago disrespects a sacred American institution which disqualifies her for the presidency. He’s so upset about this that he’s promising to go to a McDonald’s himself and “work the fries” for half an hour to prove … what? That she couldn’t possibly have scooped the fries as well as he does? I don’t get it.
He brought it up at this rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania on Monday
I think I’m gonna go to a McDonald’s next week, some place. “I’m gonna go to a McDonald’s, and I’m going to work the french fry job for about a half an hour. I want to see how it is.”
“But she said she worked, and grew up in terrible conditions, she worked at McDonald’s, it was such—SHE NEVER WORKED THERE! And these FAKE news reporters will never report it. They don’t want to report it because they’re FAKE! They’re FAKE! They don’t want to report it,”
“She never worked at McDonald’s, but it was a big part of her résumé.
Here he was in New York on Thursday
LaCivita needs to drill him a little better on this one. He got the talking points all confused. The problem was supposed to be that she’d never listed it on her résumé, not that it was big part of it.
The LA Times reported on how this whole story took off in the right wing media sphere:
On Aug. 29, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news website, published a report that questioned whether Harris had worked at McDonald’s, saying that the job was not listed on a resume she submitted a year after college and noting that biographers had not mentioned the work either. Trump’s campaign seized on the story, demanding that Harris prove she worked for the chain.
The Free Beacon story found it very odd that she didn’t have it on the professional résumé, that listed her work as a law clerk, assistant at the Federal Trade Commission and an internship with former California senator Alan Cranston. Her summer job at the fry station wasn’t exactly relevant. ( Full discIosure: I worked at Uncles Pizza Parlor when I was a teenager and I never once listed it on a résumé or even a job application. I do, however, have a burn scar on my right forearm to prove it.)
But here we have Trump getting the story backwards and saying it was a “big part of her resume” because he is addled and doesn’t make sense half the time anyway.
For some reason he really likes this smear and often gets very animated and loud when he talks about it, I would guess because he thinks his working class followers will be very offended that she would lie about doing the job that they do, as if they identify strongly as fast food professionals. Trump knows nothing about what it’s like to work in a job like that since he was born wealthy and never worked anywhere that didn’t have his name on it but he does love to eat McDonald’s so maybe this particularly aggrieves him?
MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle interviewed Harris this week and asked about the McDonald’s job and Harris explained why she has brought it up in this campaign. She replied:
Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s in our country who are trying to raise a family — I worked there as a student, I was a kid — who work there trying to raise families and pay rent on that. And I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility then is to meet those needs.
She’s right about that and Trump and his team seem to think he needs to show more of a common touch because he’s been doing something very different in this campaign. He’s been trying to mingle with “real people” something he never did much of before. This week he went to a grocery store and you would have thought he’d made a quick trip to Mars:
These “real people” events are always strange and very inauthentic for Trump. He used to avoid such corny moments, perhaps understanding his appeal better back when he was still seen as a reality TV celebrity. He was quoted saying back in 2016:
Don’t forget that when I ran in the primaries, when I was in the primaries, everyone said you can’t do that in New Hampshire, you can’t do that. You have to go and meet little groups, you have to see — cause I did big rallies, 3-4-5K people would come . . . and they said, “Wait a minute, Trump can never make it, because that’s not the way you deal with New Hampshire, you have to go to people’s living rooms, have dinner, have tea, have a good time.” I think if they ever saw me sitting in their living room they’d lose total respect for me. They’d say, I’ve got Trump in my living room, this is weird.
But this year he’s going to go to McDonald’s and make french fries to prove that Kamala Harris is a liar. Now that’s what I call weird.
My whole life I’ve been hearing about Neville Chamberlain and appeasement from the right wing, not to mention the “sell-out at Yalta.”
Take a look at this:
He relented and agreed to a meeting with Zelensky tomorrow. I wonder if he’ll tell him that he should just surrender when he wins the election because he’ll sure as hell make sure there’s no more military support once he takes office?
These rambling answers seem to really please much of the media (not Haake who does try to persist) because he’s talking to them. It doesn’t matter that he can’t answer any questions because he is completely clueless. He’s talking and that seems to be all that matters.
There’s a new poll out by the Barna group which surveys evangelical Christians and is considered to be very reliable. There’s lot’s of interesting information but this struck me as important:
Historical data indicates that turnout among the voting age population was 53.6%
in 2012 (Obama-Romney); 54.6% in 2016 (Trump-Clinton); and 61.3% in 2020
(Trump-Biden). If the election were held now (about 7 weeks before November
5th), the expected turnout would be 50% of voting age adults. Typically, that
turnout figure will rise several percentage points, likely concluding in the 53% to 55% range. That would put the 2024 election squarely in line with the turnout levels of 2012 and 2016, but below that of 2020.
It’s big problem for Trump if any of his evangelical followers don’t vote. But one biggie there at the bottom is especially problematic this time. The voters who say the election is rigged are almost certainly his. He can’t afford to lose them.
I must say, this surprised me (actually not…)
Moral decline was identified by less than one-quarter of the churched Christians
(23%) as a defining issue in this election.
A pussy-grabbing, con-artist, pathological lying felon is running for president and most of them will vote for him so clearly, morals are not of much interest to these people anymore.
Interesting, no? So what do they care about?
It’s nice to see poverty and homelessness make the list but why do I think that empathy isn’t necessarily what’s driving the concern for many of them? (Maybe it’s because the rest of their agenda closely mirrors Donald Trump’s?)
Among the churched Christians interviewed, Donald Trump generated, by far, the
highest favorable rating of the seven leaders tested. Overall, seven out of 10
(69%) had a very or somewhat favorable score for Trump. No other leader topped
50%. The closest were Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (48%) and VP running mate, Sen.
J.D. Vance (46%). Former President Obama received a favorable score from 37%.
Lower ratings were awarded to Kamala Harris (28%), Timothy Walz (22%) and Joe
Biden (20%).
The highest “unfavorable” rating was generated by Joe Biden (70%), closely
followed by his Vice President and current Democrat candidate Kamala Harris
(64%). No other leaders evaluated received a negative rating by a majority of
churched Christians. Donald Trump had a negative score from one-quarter of the
respondents (25%).
McDonald’s is actually not on her resume which he used to use as proof that she never worked there. But nobody puts their summer job while they’re in school on their professional resume. (Trump wouldn’t know that because he never had a job other than working for daddy before he inherited his $400 million.) Now he’s saying is all over her resume I guess to push that she’s a liar?
I don’t know why Trump thinks this is such a put away shot but he’s leaning very heavily on it. Usually I can see why he thinks something is going to resonate with the MAGA cult but I honestly can’t see it this time. Sure, he wants to portray her as lying about her normal middle class upbringing (I guess to say she’s a Marxist???) but the fact that she worked at McDonald’s doesn’t prove or disprove that.
She’s not lying but I doubt there’s a record of her short term part time job from 40 years ago. So is he trying to make this into a new “birther ” scandal? (“Burger” scandal?) I just don’t get it.
He’s also ranting and raving about Springfield and Aurora, calling the Governor a coward and claiming that communities all over Americans are being “decimated” of course. Just droning on and on about all the usual BS.
By the way, that’s from Trump’s “press conference” which is basically just another of his rallies which he holds regularly for the media. It’s also what that same elite media hold up as an example of Trump’s transparency and accessibility in contrast to Kamala Harris. They love to be suckers for Trump.
And guess what he had to say about Eric Adams? Yep:
I don’t know how much time you have to listen to podcasts but if you’re interested in the minutia of the electoral college vote and are worried about Pennsylvania, this one with Greg Sargent interviewing Gov. Josh Shapiro may be up your alley. An excerpt:
If Kamala Harris can defeat Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, she almost certainly will win the presidency. It’s must-win for him. Yet the state remains a coin-flip—which is why both candidates campaigned in the state this week. So what is Harris’s path to victory? We talked to Governor Josh Shapiro, who explained why the race is so close—and why he thinks she’s “on her way” to winning there, in part due to concerted communications with non-college voters. Shapiro also responded at length to Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants living in Pennsylvania, pronouncing them “utter bullshit.”
Here is the whole thing:
I know the polls show a very close race. But as I wrote in an earlier post,
Naturally, the MAGAs had him removed.
Their sense of humor is confined to making fun of disabled people and chanting “lock her up” and “send them back.”
Donald Trump is running for president. And he may just win. It’s that close. And this is what he’s doing 6 weeks before the election.
The watches sell for $499, which I’m sure is a bargain for the people who are suffering in this economy which Trump says is the worst in American history.
But get a load of this:
He is basically soliciting bribes at this point. He can raise a quick million and a half from rich buddies and it will go directly into his pocket before the election. As we’ve seen with his promises to everyone from the oil and gas industry to the vape industry in exchange for policy promises in the last few months, Trump is in a frenzy of corruption right now.
I wonder why this hasn’t really penetrated the media? We’re hearing lots of details about Eric Adams’ alleged crimes, some of which are worth big money and others which are penny ante graft. Meanwhile there’s virtually nothing about the recent reporting about Trump’s huge $10 million bribe from Egypt in 2016 or him selling Bibles, NFTs, Crypto, Picture Book, Shoes, and hundreds of other trinkets and now $100,000 watches to 147 lucky interested parties, in the middle of his presidential campaign!
We know the DOJ will not charge him for anything in the weeks before the election but considering what they did to Clinton when Comey re-opened the “butheremails” investigation 2 weeks ahead of the election, you’d think someone would find this to be a worthy story.
You may recall that he said this yesterday:
Check out this piece by Jill Lawrence in the LA Times. She recently went to Los Alamos and suggests that people should stay away during this presidential election because you won’t be able to sleep at night:
President Truman followed through with the plan to use the bombs that ended World War II.
Truman could have stopped it. He didn’t, but right afterward he ordered that presidential permission was required for such action, and his administration made it official policy in a 1948 memo: U.S. presidents had the sole authority to launch nuclear weapons. If a president gives the word, the military must obey. That’s even if America has not been attacked, and even if a president is demonstrably unfit. A president, for instance, such as Trump, whose reckless, divisive term ended with his loyalists — at his urging — staging a deadly attack on the Capitol to try to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election.
“President Trump’s last terrifying weeks in office have been a wake-up call. Never again should we allow a dangerous president to have unilateral control over nuclear launch,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Defense Secretary William J. Perry wrote in USA Today shortly after the mob rioted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Trump wasn’t the first president to raise such concerns, they said, nor would he be the last. They called for ending “this godlike power” for all presidents to come.
But presidents still have it. And Trump is now trying for a second term in a race most analysts consider too close to call — a prospect so disturbing that this week more than 700 current and former national security officials signed a bipartisan letter endorsing his opponent, asking Americans to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris because Trump is “impulsive and ill-informed.” Just days earlier, more than 100 former Republican national security officials warned in a similar Harris endorsement that Trump’s erratic nature “threatens reckless and dangerous global consequences.”
A volatile temperament is one of the many reasons Trump is a national security menace. As Hillary Clinton memorably noted in her 2016 convention speech accepting the Democratic nomination: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”
He’s worse than he used to be and much, much angrier and resentful. And he won’t have people like Milley, Mattis, Esper and the like around him. Think more like Michael Flynn. Or General Buck Turgidson.
Yes, I know people are still suffering, an unfortunately common circumstance in our unequal society. There is more work to do, always. But Biden did something very smart and the Republicans did everything they could to stop it. I will be beyond disgusted if Trump ekes out another win and takes credit for all this and the media and MAGA happily give it to him. Which they will.